Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history.
Whether it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work,
that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether,
the fault once committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been
ferocious and disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse
on the part of the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been
on the part of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there
had not been an excess of weights in one balance of the scale,
in the one which contains expiation. Whether the over-weight
of the penalty was not equivalent to the annihilation of the crime,
and did not result in reversing the situation, of replacing the fault
of the delinquent by the fault of the repression, of converting
the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor into the creditor,
and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the man who had
violated it.

Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society
against the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh
every day, a crime which had lasted nineteen years.

He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force
its members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable
lack of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight;
and to seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess,
a default of work and an excess of punishment.

Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely